Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Juno frowns. “What sightline?”
Devereaux turns his head just enough that the mirror behind him picks up an angle of the main room. “Your stepfather,” he says. “Entered seven minutes ago. Green band. He is currently at the north banquette with a woman who is not your mother.”
Time folds. Juno’s breath leaves in a small, personal collapse. My hand finds her knee without thinking. She doesn’t flinch. Her eyes burn—shock first, then insult, then a fast, airy grief that looks like the moment before glass breaks.
“No,” she says. It’s not denial. It’s a vow.
I stand already, because if she rises fast she’ll tip into act and we are not acting yet. Devereaux holds up a palm once—rules—and lowers it again. “Do not break my house,” he says gently. “If you want a closer look, come with me. If you want to breathe, stay and I’ll close the mirror.”
“I want to see,” Juno says, voice very calm, which is my least favorite tone on her because it lives three inches from the edge of a cliff.
Devereaux leads us to a sightline in Pride that might as well have been designed for interventions. We look like people admiring a painting. In the mirror’s angle, I see him: Bob. Khakis made fancy with a blazer he thinks hides the office badge in his blood. Green band. An expression I recognize from Sunday dinners when he expected applause for remembering to bake pie.
The woman across from him is mid-thirties, sleek hair, a dress that says I belong here, or I know how to pretend convincingly. She laughs at something he says. He touches her wrist in that automatic, territorial way some men think reads as charm. It’s not lurid. That almost makes it worse. She looks familiar.
“Who is she?” I whisper.
“Etta Hoy,” Juno answers, voice breaking. Juno’s jaw tightens until I worry about her teeth. Her fingers crush the red band in her palm. “He took her? Here?” she says.
“The influencer? The one Arby knew?” That can’t be a coincidence.
“He brings people where he feels powerful,” Devereaux says, not unkindly. “This room is safer than most of the rooms he uses to impress. It is also not a place to confront a man if you want the confrontation to count.”
She breathes once, hard. I can feel the moment where she pictures walking across the room and setting everything on fire. I can feel the moment where she chooses to set something else on fire later.
“Is he… connected?” I ask Devereaux. “To the Five?” The question tastes like a dare. Paul worked under Bob. The finger gun. The donor dinners. The adjacency is right there like a wire we could pull.
“Your stepfather is not who you think he is,” Devereaux says. “He tips like a man who thinks tips buy silence.”
Juno swallows. She sets the band on the table very gently, like an egg she refuses to break. “We don’t confront him here,” she says. “We watch. We follow. We see who he sees. We learn why he came here. And we follow her too.”
“Good,” Devereaux says. “You are angry and you are not stupid. My favorite combination in a guest.”
He gestures a staffer over with a look. “Please seat Ms. Kate and Mr. Finn in Pride’s corner again. Inform me when Mr. Kate—” he pauses, corrects kindly, “—Mr. O’Neill—moves theaters.”
We retake our seats. Juno trembles once in the way you tremble when you don’t have time to fall apart yet. I angle my knee to her knee, and she presses back so lightly it might be an accident. Her eyes never leave the mirror.
“Render,” I turn on the comm, and murmur, voice casual enough to sound like flirting. “New targets. Bob O’Neill. Etta Hoy. North banquette. Track exit.”
“On it,” Render says. “Knight, get cozy by the valet. Ozzy, you’re now Mr. Mint at the bar. Gage, if Bob’s name pings your donor list, give me a color.”
Gage replies with a little spark. “Color: beige. He’s VIP-adjacent. Donor enough to feel seen, not enough to be useful at parties.”
“Perfect,” Juno says under her breath. “Useful men don’t go to Club Greed on a Wednesday.”
Devereaux ghosts back into the salon and returns ten minutes later, tablet in hand. “Adjacency maps are rendering,” he says. “Coleman’s constellation is… expected. Beau’s is noisier. Rook prefers quiet rooms. Devin’s is a puppy. Merritt’s was—” He stops, the respect of an obituary in the air. “—messier than people think. Your stepfather’s constellation shows donor dinners, two afternoons at Stonehouse, and one Marina Club brunch with gray suits you will not like.”
He tips the tablet so we can see a sanitized web—nodes without names, lines of varying thickness. One cluster glows denser where five nodes overlap. He taps it with two fingers. “This is your hive,” he says. “I’ll give my wife the names.”